Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey

by Ariel Dorfman

  I had, of course, less precarious ways of returning to the place I insisted on calling home, subscribing to more magazines, from Mad to The Saturday Evening Post, than I ever had read in the States, trying particularly to keep abreast of sports. And comics and mystery books that, unlike candy, could be consumed over and over again. And movies—every epic, every saccharine love story, even the blundering cheap Ed Wood-type grade-C sci-fi movies that are now the staple of jokes on U.S. television.

  There in Chile I made myself into much more of an all-American kid than any child back in the States. As if the still unacknowledged tug of Spanish and this new country had sparked an even more violent counterattachment to the United States. As if I had fervently to display my fealty, set to rest any suspicion that I might, in fact, be in danger of losing that connection.

  The connection, however, was in no danger of losing me. Everywhere I turned, America was abundantly present, particularly in the music young Chileans were starting to listen to. My newly recovered Spanish might let me understand the lyrics of the bolero and the tango and the ranchero, but I continued to despise these Latin-American songs, thought—along with my pro-Yankee cohorts from the fortress of the Grange with whom I gabbed in English at school and at home—that they showed the taste of the dark-skinned lower classes, las sirvientas, the old farts. In our rooms and at our dances the radio was invariably plugged into one of the stations that, more and more as the decade wore on, played only American records, at first Frank Sinatra and the Ames Brothers and Nat King Cole. But soon enough, just in time, the first defiant beats of Elvis and Bill Haley and Connie Francis, just in time for a body rebelling into adolescence, just in time for a body aching for a rhythm that could express the uncertain promise and turmoil of sex.

  If I was able to tune in that easily to all these manifestations of American culture, it was because they did not need to be imported by my father, they did not arrive every three months in a shipment. They were invading Chile as fast as they were invading the rest of the world, the preamble of a a global culture which allowed any kid anywhere to sing and dance the same tunes being blared out halfway across the planet.

  Years later, during the Allende revolution, I was to deplore and denounce that expansion of the United States media industry as a threat to the national ethos and sensibility, but back in the fifties I was its beneficiary. If I could lap up so many American movies, it was because the locally owned film-distribution companies were being taken over by Hollywood affiliates and the national cinematographic industry that had flourished during the Second World War was being squeezed into irrelevancy by the U.S. monopolies. I didn’t issue a call to resistance at the time. Chilean girls with budding breasts and wannabe-English accents were swooning over those songs, and I’d have been out of my mind to discourage or interrupt any crooner who was urging those blessed creatures to dance cheek-to-cheek, get a bit closer, a little bit closer. So in the battle for the survival of the fittest, I jacked up my one asset, my mastery of English. Though it wasn’t Shakespeare empowering me, but Fats Domino.

  With everybody around me facing North in awe, I didn’t hesitate to deploy an aura of modernity, pressed my advantage as an up-to-date walking encyclopedia of colloquial, ultra-hip Americana. Even so, infatuated as I was by U.S. popular culture, during my high school years I also became increasingly aware that my adopted country was responsible for the misery of Latin America and, specifically, of Chile.

  In New York I had heard, of course, about U.S. imperialism. My parents had never lost an occasion to point out to their Yankee-loving son that his America the Beautiful had thrived by being America the Ugly south of the border, but that ugliness only became screamingly apparent once we had moved to the continent which the United States treated as its back yard. Just one example: in 1954, the very year I left the States, Guatemala had been invaded by a U.S.-trained force (supported by U.S. Air Force bombardment) because its democratically elected President, Jacobo Arbenz, had dared to try to nationalize some of the land belonging to the United Fruit Company. One year later, the exiled Arbenz himself came to dinner at our house in Santiago. His pain and the pain of his country were the direct result of what my country had done there, in Central America. I could go on and on with hundreds of examples, but none was to impress me more than one single incident that brought home to me, a few years after we moved to Santiago, the crude reality of how an empire works.

  Down the street from our house there lived a bespectacled, crew-cut American boy, Bernie, whose father was a high executive with one of the U.S. copper companies that owned and ran the Chilean mines. He wasn’t exactly a friend, but more of a buddy, two boys far from their country who lived on the same street: we’d exchange comics, listen to records, discuss the latest trades in the American League back home, fantasize about “broads,” eat his mother’s brownies, compete to blow the largest chewing-gum bubbles.

  One day—a few months before Bernie was to return to the States—he opened a closet in his room and showed me, hidden underneath a mound of clothes, an enormous glass jar. It was filled with Chilean pesos, all of them copper.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  I didn’t know what to think. What was it for?

  “These guys are so, so stupid,” Bernie said, pointing in the direction of the street, of Santiago, of Chile, of Latin America. “You know what I’m going to do with these coins? I’m going to melt them, turn them into five bars of copper, sell them. I’m going to get ten times the price. They’re Indians, these guys, they like to get fucked.”

  I was shocked. I had heard insensitive remarks about Chile before and I would hear them again: from classmates at the Grange, in their houses, and at the Prince of Wales Country Club, where my dazzling English conned the Chilean guards at the gate into admitting me even if I was not a member. But none of those bigoted off-the-cuff remarks stuck in my gut like Bernie’s get-rich-quick scheme, perhaps because none was so egregious, none so blatant and direct. In fact, I have found myself hesitating whether to consign this episode here, because, grotesque to the point of inverisimilitude, it was almost too perfect a metaphor of greed and empire: an American teenager hoarding those coins like a third-rate Scrooge McDuck, repeating on a minor scale what his father was doing in a major way, both of them bent on screwing the country out of its metal.

  Was it only Bernie’s covetousness, his racism, his relish at conning the local population, his disparagement of this country that, after all, had given my family refuge and provided us with a delightful existence in the midst of such natural beauty, was it only that which made me feel sick? Or can I detect, faintly stirring in the boy I used to be, the hint of a new allegiance to Chile, a tinge of pride in being Latin American, the first time I felt that I was on the other side of the divide, us against them? If so, what had created the distance, what was really coming between Bernie and me, between the United States and me, was the impoverishment of Chile.

  It was not that I discovered the existence of misery when we went to live in Chile. I cannot, literally, remember a time in my life when I was not mindful of the fact that there were many in the world less fortunate than my family. I look back and see them there, on the rim of my life, watching me as I watched them, and what I recall is my compassion, my attempt to jump into their point of view, to beggar myself into their eyes, to wonder what hunger meant, what sickness meant, what despair meant, what it meant to die before having lived. But as there were not that many really indigent people around in booming New York after the Second World War, their mysterious destiny was, in a sense, an abstraction, they became an occasion for intellectual elaboration, to be explained away into comprehensible categories, particularly by my father. Whenever I asked why those harrowing figures of destitution haunted my books or comics or films (more than my streets), my father would use that example to educate me, point out that the poor existed as a direct, and necessary, consequence of the richness of a small minority.

  Once we were in C
hile, however, poverty ceased to be an abstraction. It was there the day we arrived, in the tired backs of the longshoremen on the docks as our ship creaked against its moorings; it was there in the weatherbeaten shacks clustered like flies on Valparaiso’s hills; it was there in the bare feet of peasants laboring on fields that did not belong to them, scarcely raising their bronze faces as our car whizzed by on the road to Santiago; it was there in the endless shantytowns of the capital, the urban sprawl of cardboard-and-tin hovels among the weeds and the stray dogs; it was there in the army of derelicts of all ages that crisscrossed the avenues of the city, sleeping under the bridges of the Mapocho and blanketing the steps of the churches as if they were crippled birds.

  “You’ll get used to that,” a UN colleague of my father’s said to me, in English, when he heard me expressing amazement at such widespread misery. “As there’s not very much that you can do about it, anyway.”

  He was more right than wrong in his rather flippant assessment. Even if I could not avoid being intermittently embarrassed whenever a human being in distress came limping through my life, I was basically walled away from the poor of Chile in every possible way: I was young, I lived in a well-to-do neighborhood, and I attended a school which trained the elite that would govern this country and its wealth.

  I did make one attempt to intervene in the quagmire of Chilean poverty. I must have been around fourteen and spoke enough Spanish to engage people outside my house in ordinary conversation, and one day when I was returning from the dentist’s I had taken pity on a street urchin who was singing boleros on the bus. His voice was as cracked as his blistered feet. He was covered with scabs, his hair a shock of black sticky strands, his shirt torn. He couldn’t have been more than six years old. I gave him a coin, asked him a question, he saw a friendly light in my eyes and, perhaps encouraged by my strange accent, he began to tell his story: how it was better to live on the streets than risk the beatings of a father who might or might not be around; how the pacos (the Chilean police) had picked him up one day and threatened to put him in an institution but he had fooled them and escaped; how once in a while he made his way home to his mother, who was always sweet to him and had taught him his repertory of lovelorn canciones. As he talked, our bus began to enter the barrio alto, where I lived, and as we passed the façades of opulent estates behind which the upper classes lived in outrageous luxury, that little boy’s condition became all the more pathetic, so that, when we reached my bus stop in a somewhat more modest part of the area, I impulsively invited him to come home with me for a hot meal. Our house was far from being a mansion; just a large, comfortable residence, but seen through his eyes, it took on the magnificence of a palace.

  We had two servants—one who cooked and one who cleaned and served at table—and neither was delighted to see the seedy guest I had brought home. But my parents weren’t around, so I was the boss. The kid chattered away while he ate, and then my mother came home and, after joining us for a moment, went off to rummage in the attic for some old clothes for the kid. I escorted my young friend to the door and told him that I hoped to see him again.

  The very next day the doorbell rang and there he was. Again I invited him in for a good meal, but this time my mother didn’t make an appearance with clothes or a welcoming smile, nor, when I said goodbye, did I suggest that we set up another meeting, suspecting that he would be back, anyway. I wasn’t surprised when, twenty-four hours later, he turned up with two other waifs. This time I hesitated, but what was I to do? Turn them away? They marched into the kitchen and I sat them down in front of the cook and she frowned and extricated some leftovers from the fridge and warmed them, grumbling under her breath, and then the doorbell rang again and the maid went off to see who it was and came back and announced noncommittally, “Buscan.”Somebody had come to see me.

  Outside our gate stood the mother (at least she said she was) of my singing friend with a baby in her arms and a ragged older girl clinging to her dress. She asked if I had any work for her, for the girl. I told her to wait and went upstairs to my own mother, who took charge of the situation. She walked out to speak to the woman, gave her some money, informed her that unfortunately we had no work, and added that the boy and his friends would be out very soon.

  Half an hour later, when all the intruders had left, my mother sat me down, complimented me on my good heart and told me firmly that this could not go on. This was not the way to solve the problems of Chile’s perpetual underdevelopment. One beggar had begat two more and now others were clamoring at the door and this was incremental, there were too many indigent people out there and too few homes like ours that even cared. We would be overrun and unable to lead a normal life. I could, of course, if I was so inclined, sell my records and my books and my candy bars—but not my clothes! she added hastily—and turn them into cash for my afflicted chums. My mother warned me that within a few days the supply would be gone and I would be back exactly where I was now: they would still be as poor as ever and I would be as fed and clothed and housed as ever, the line dividing us would not have disappeared. Someday perhaps, I would be able to do something about that line and that poverty, just as my father had tried, but now was not the time and this was not the way.

  The next afternoon I watched as the maid went out to the gate when my singing urchin came around again, with the same two pals, and with a couple of older kids hovering in the background. I watched from behind the curtains in a room filled with art books, a room where my mother played the piano to songs I sang in English, a room with an enormous reproduction of a Siqueiros painting showing Latin America as a centaur in agony, half beast, half man, always divided, I watched the maid tell the kid that I wasn’t home, and he looked straight at where I was hiding behind the curtains and then up toward the second story of our house, where my room was. I watched from that house filled with books that analyzed inequality and surplus value and economic underdevelopment and the philosophy of justice and the rights of indigenous peoples. I watched the boy turn away, and the next day he came one last time and I forced myself to contemplate his defeat and my defeat all over again, and that was it. After that, he never rang the bell again. He understood what had happened, the limits of my compassion, he came no more, and whatever guilt I felt was insufficient to make me interrupt the life I had led up until then. I continued my estranged existence in Chile almost as if nothing had happened. But I had learned something: the truth of who we were, the boy and I, the cards we had been dealt. I lived here, in a safe, happy house, the foreign, bilingual son of a diplomat going to the most exclusive school in Chile, and that child had nothing but his throat and his songs of adult love and betrayal to ward off death. I watched him wander off under the splendid trees of Santiago and the mountains that years later would urge me not to leave this country, and his tribulation and abandonment were made all the starker by the contrast they offered to the breathtakingly beautiful surroundings in which they festered, that land which had more than enough resources to feed him a million times over and could not even guarantee him, and so many others like him, one meal a day.

  If I ended up transitorily trapped in the prophecy of my father’s UN colleague, unable to intervene in the age-old injustice of Chile, I would not be left there for very long. All around me, thousands of other inhabitants of Chile were ready to take more decisive action.

  Two hundred years before I arrived on the shores of that country and wondered how so much bounty could produce so much suffering, a Chilean named José Cos de Iribari had asked a similar question even before independence had been gained from Spain: How is it possible that, “in the midst of the lavishness and splendor of [Latin American] nature,” most of the population was “groaning under the yoke of poverty, misery and the vices which are their inevitable consequences”? And now, after that question, repeated by each generation of Chileans (and Latin Americans in the rest of the continent), had received no satisfactory answer, a left-wing movement of intellectuals and workers and peasants
that had been forming during most of the century was gaining strength. Since colonial times, the same ruling classes, and their allies abroad, had kept a stranglehold on the country’s economy and, most of the time, on its government as well, and the result had been social injustice, educational and technological stagnation, a scandalous disparity between the means and life-style of a small oligarchy and those of the vast impoverished nation, a productive system geared to the exigencies of the foreign marketplace rather than the needs of the citizens themselves. The left proclaimed that it was time to institute real reforms amd wrest control of Chile’s wealth from foreign corporations and a handful of greedy families. It was time for a different class to take power. It was time, they said, for a revolution.